O'mehe Autoschismatic Empire
The O'mehe Autoschismatic Empire was an archversal political entity residing within the Beyond bubble housing Soci Gahir and thus in a region once attacked by the External Hazard. Having maintained a status quo during that war for eons, the Empire proved stable long after it ended, succumbing only to a gradual shift that saw its dominant cultural fixture fade from public interest. Obsessed with war as a concept but hesitant to throw itself fully against the invading Hazard, the Empire instead provided indirect military aid for most of its history, though it was also the birthplace of Akejan Osioi Ctarin, one of Task Force Iris's members. History Ample time passed during the war against the Hazard for entire -verses to come into existence and life to develop within. Early in the war, a relatively peaceful region saw the growth of a technologically gifted species known as the Oeta. The Oeta regime expanded throughout its home universe, exterminating lesser civilizations in the way, until they had fully encompassed it and found no further options available at first. Expecting that no way out of the universe would ever be found, the Oeta turned against one another, aiming to refine their strategies and prepare for a "perfect war" that no one figured would come. But technology marched on, and two critical black-swan discoveries forced a total societal reset once their implications were fully explored. First, breakthroughs in biotech and femtotech made the Oeta warriors so durable and regenerative that few weapons could physically kill them, causing the internal wars to become not only less violent but also frequently nonlethal in intent altogether. Second, the discovery of portal-based multiversal travel allowed the Oeta to branch out and theoretically gather more resources, but at a price: an individual or faction genuinely fighting for its life could escape rather easily into an inaccessible region of higher space and start anew, rendering the concept of continually-warring nations somewhat pointless. Faced with a dilemma - expand and change radically, or stay behind and maintain the status quo - the Oeta elected to reorganize their entire civilization around a perpetual wargame, pushing aside any bystanders in favor of eternally developing more and more effective weapons for the "perfect war". The newly-christened O'mehe Autoschismatic Empire grew very slowly and was not taken seriously by resident entities at first; however, when the Hazard arrived at the border of their omniverse, local gods demanded military aid from the Empire. Convinced at first that the Hazard would not give them the conflict they desired, the Empire's leaders eventually relented and agreed to give supplies and munitions to defense forces. When the secret cabal of engineer deities assembling Task Force Iris arrived, reasoning that a militaristic civilization would have capable combatants, one of their number picked out a promising player in the wargame, Akejan, as a member of the task force. Akejan's return merited her a high-ranking command position from which she influenced the development of the wargames until her death. No longer required to pay much attention to the Beyond bubble as a whole, the Empire continued its games in larger environments, expanding through many archverse layers and remaining in existence for countless golden-age eons after the war ended. As the Empire grew and its leaders rotated out, many of them became less overtly militaristic and sought to train their people in less violent ways, such as through religion and culture. A gradually weakening sentiment of xenophobia amongst the general populace let them invite nearby civilizations for their games and eventually integrate; in time, the Empire's many factions collectively agreed to drop their unity and strike out into the omniverse as independent polities. No wars or revolutions shook the Empire in its last days; long after its destruction, its factions-turned-nations often remained close allies. Technology Most historians agree that the Empire found its own greatest scientific triumph to be the effective merger of biology and progressively more advanced technology. The Oeta - who began by bioengineering themselves into a variety of shapes from humanoid to geometric - integrated to varying degrees with machinery, relying both on subtle, invisible applications of sub-nanotech and on durable, flexible components at the macro-scale. Practically every citizen of the Empire at its height had at the bare minimum a few brain components altered for hyperspeed processing (granting a high-consciousness to low-communality SQ of 18 or higher), a reactive attomesh embedded in their body tissues to interdict physical, electromagnetic, and nuclear-force attacks, and a comprehensive sensor suite painting their skin that could sync with a network of orbital devices to provide planet-spanning senses at all times. Those involved in frontline combat regularly manifested powered armor of various sorts, FTL boosters, and weapons of up to supercluster-level destructive capability. The Empire also had a reputation for its skill in universal and multiversal engineering. Dreadnoughts found extensive use in the Empire, as they both fought in the wargames and ferried passengers and cargo between territories. The large-scale use of stringshard allowed for larger and larger -verses to be turned into fortress megastructures or hubs for daily life and trade. Culture The O'mehe Autoschismatic Empire was so named because of its core societal conceit: that an empire could remain unified while carefully splintering itself into factions, and that it could remain prepared for war by engaging in an unending wargame between any factions that happened to be around at the time. The number of factions fluctuated from as few as ten to as many as a hundred and fifty billion, depending largely on the Empire's current territorial size and the social consensus as to what would make a good set of wargames at the time. While their scope and nature varied somewhat over time, the wargames were almost universally centered around full-scale military exercises between the entirety of each faction's armed forces. A precisely codified set of rules governed the state of the games, which were kept as nonlethal as feasible and timed such that, no matter which operations had completed or which factions had lost, they would continue until the Empire was physically unable to manage them. Citizens of the Empire were removed from their homes at birth, raised communally by the sole neutral "referee" faction (which also had the job of executing those who violated the most serious of rules by committing war crimes and the like), chose a faction at maturity, and could later switch at will given extenuating circumstances (such as the deletion of their home faction or a permanent mental alteration). A high degree of social flexibility let each faction's members swap between combatant and non-combatant many times over their lives, in many cases developing the new technology that they themselves would later use in battle. Personal relationships between members of different factions were prohibited early on but later treated more neutrally; like any smaller-scale alliance, business partnership, or the like, the ebb and flow of factional conflict would dictate their stability and could break them up naturally. The Empire's continual expansion necessitated additional sets of rules regarding the treatment of alien civilizations, which gradually shifted from forced relocation to temporary accommodation and eventually to integration. In the event that an outside force posed a serious threat to the Empire as a whole, its constituent factions were entirely capable of putting their wargames on pause and uniting almost instantly. Category:Cosmic Entity Group